On Thu 07 May 2009 09:25:52 AM EDT, Tim Chase wrote: > While it doesn't use grep or external processes, I'd just do it > in pure Python:
Thanks for the code! I'm reluctant to take that approach for a few reasons: 1. Writing tests for that code seems like a fairly large amount of work. I think I'd need to to either mock out lots of stuff or create a bunch of temporary directories and files for each test run. I don't intend to test that grep works like it says it does. I'll just test that my code calls a mocked-out grep with the right options and arguments, and that my code behaves nicely when my mocked-out grep returns errors. 2. grep is crazy fast. For a search through just a few files, I doubt it would matter, but when searching through a thousand files (which is likely) I suspect that an all-python approach might lag behind. I'm speculating here, though. 3. grep has lots and lots of cute options. I don't want to think about implementing stuff like --color, for example. If I just pass all the heavy lifting to grep, I'm already done. On the other hand, your solution is platform-independent and has no dependencies. Mine depends on an external grep command. Thanks again for the feedback! Matt -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
